Saturday, October 29, 2016

The toughest windusrfing contest in the world, Red Bull Storm Chase, is back for 2017!Eight of the world's top windsurfers will be pitted against windspeeds up to Force 10 (89-102kmh), huge waves and intense hurricane conditions, making for an epic battle of Man VS Nature.The waiting period begins January 9th and the contest will hold until the strongest storm of the winter hits the Northern Hemisphere.In anticipation for the event, take a look back at the best action highlights from the last contest.

The number of wild animals living on Earth is set to fall by two-thirds by 2020, according to a new report, part of a mass extinction that is destroying the natural world upon which humanity depends.
The analysis, the most comprehensive to date, indicates that animal
populations plummeted by 58% between 1970 and 2012, with losses on track
to reach 67% by 2020.
Researchers from WWF and the Zoological Society
of London compiled the report from scientific data and found that the
destruction of wild habitats, hunting and pollution were to blame.
The creatures being lost range from mountains to forests to rivers
and the seas and include well-known endangered species such as elephants
and gorillas and lesser known creatures such as vultures and
salamanders.

The leatherback turtle, feeding here on a pyrosome, has become increasingly rare in both the tropical Atlantic and Pacific.

It declined by 95% between 1989 and 2002 in Las Baulas national park in Costa Rica, mainly caused by mortality at sea due to individuals being caught as bycatch and by development around nesting beaches.

Similar trends have been observed throughout the species’ range.Photograph: Brian J. Skerry/NG/Getty Images

The collapse of wildlife is, with climate change, the most striking sign of the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological era
in which humans dominate the planet.
“We are no longer a small world on
a big planet.
We are now a big world on a small planet, where we have
reached a saturation point,” said Prof Johan Rockström, executive
director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, in a foreword for the
report.
Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF, said: “The richness and
diversity of life on Earth is fundamental to the complex life systems
that underpin it.
Life supports life itself and we are part of the same
equation.
Lose biodiversity and the natural world and the life support
systems, as we know them today, will collapse.”
He said humanity was completely dependent on nature for clean air and
water, food and materials, as well as inspiration and happiness.

The European eel is declining due to disease, overfishing and changes to its freshwater habitat that impede its migration to the sea to breed.Photograph: Erling Svensen/WWF/PA

The report analysed the changing abundance of more than 14,000
monitored populations of the 3,700 vertebrate species for which good
data is available.
This produced a measure akin to a stock market index
that indicates the state of the world’s 64,000 animal species and is used by scientists to measure the progress of conservation efforts.
The biggest cause of tumbling animal numbers is the destruction of
wild areas for farming and logging: the majority of the Earth’s land
area has now been impacted by humans, with just 15% protected for
nature.
Poaching and exploitation for food is another major factor, due
to unsustainable fishing and hunting: more than 300 mammal species are being eaten into extinction, according to recent research.
Pollution is also a significant problem with, for example, killer whales and dolphins in European seas being seriously harmed by long-lived industrial pollutants.
Vultures in south-east Asia have been decimated over the last 20 years, dying after eating the carcasses of cattle dosed with an anti-inflammatory drug.
Amphibians have suffered one of the greatest declines of all animals due to a fungal disease thought to be spread around the world by the trade in frogs and newts.

Desert Seas narrated by David Attenborough tells the story of how the peninsula of Arabia transformed from an ocean millions of years ago to the desert it is today.The Gulf is now home to a myriad of sea creatures but, just as Arabia was once ocean, a mere 10,000 years ago this expanse of water was a swampy flood plain.Since it drowned as sea levels rose, the Gulf is now the world's hottest and saltiest open sea.The Red Sea, on the other hand, is a far older coral-fringed chasm formed as plate tectonics pulled Africa and Arabia apart; its reefs are prowled by huge moray eels and their shrimp entourages.Splash into the waves that line this desert land and join us as we explore these waters in stunning HD and see what other treasures hide within these mysterious and little-studied seas.

Rivers and lakes are the hardest hit habitats, with animals
populations down by 81% since 1970, due to excessive water extraction,
pollution and dams.
All the pressures are magnified by global warming,
which shifts the ranges in which animals are able to live, said WWF’s
director of science, Mike Barrett.
Some researchers have reservations about the report’s approach, which
summarises many different studies into a headline number.
“It is
broadly right, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts,” said
Prof Stuart Pimm, at Duke University in the US, adding that looking at
particular groups, such as birds, is more precise.
The
report warns that losses of wildlife will impact on people and could
even provoke conflicts: “Increased human pressure threatens the natural
resources that humanity depends upon, increasing the risk of water and
food insecurity and competition over natural resources.”
However, some species are starting to recover, suggesting swift action could tackle the crisis.Tiger numbers are thought to be increasing and the giant panda has recently been removed from the list of endangered species.

Ocean Animals - Life Under the Sea (National Geographic)

In Europe, protection of the habitat of the Eurasian lynx and
controls on hunting have seen its population rise fivefold since the
1960s.
A recent global wildlife summit also introduced new protection
for pangolins, the world’s most trafficked mammals, and rosewoods, the most trafficked wild product of all.
But stemming the overall losses of animals and habitats requires
systemic change in how society consumes resources, said Barrett.
People
can choose to eat less meat, which is often fed on grain grown on
deforested land, and businesses should ensure their supply chains, such
as for timber, are sustainable, he said.

“You’d like to think that was a no-brainer in that if a business is
consuming the raw materials for its products in a way that is not
sustainable, then inevitably it will eventually put itself out of
business,” Barrett said.
Politicians must also ensure all their policies
- not just environmental ones - are sustainable, he added.
“The report is certainly a pretty shocking snapshot of where we are,”
said Barrett.
“My hope though is that we don’t throw our hands up in
despair - there is no time for despair, we have to crack on and act.
I
do remain convinced we can find our sustainable course through the
Anthropocene, but the will has to be there to do it.”

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Refugees and migrants get off a fishing boat at the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey in October 2015. More than 1 million refugees and migrants escaped to Europe in 2015, the UN refugee agency said.

This year has become the deadliest for migrants crossing the Mediterranean bound for Europe, the UN refugee agency said Wednesday, with those seeking to make the journey from Libya at greatest risk.
"We can now confirm that at least 3,800 people have died, making 2016 the deadliest ever," William Spindler, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, wrote on Twitter.

According to UN Radio, 3,771 lives were lost during 2015, the previous highest number.
"This is the worst we have seen," Spindler told journalists at a briefing Tuesday in Geneva, Switzerland, as the grim record for 2016 loomed.

Migrants, most of them from Eritrea, jump into the Mediterranean from a crowded wooden boat during a rescue operation about 13 miles north of Sabratha, Libya, on Monday, August 29

"The high loss of life comes despite a large overall fall this year in the number of people seeking to cross the Mediterranean to Europe."
He said at least 1.02 million made the crossing in 2015, while 327,800 have so far this year.
"From one death for every 269 arrivals last year, in 2016 the likelihood of dying has spiraled to one in 88," Spindler said.
On what's known as the Central Mediterranean route between Libya and Italy, "the likelihood of dying is even higher, at one death for every 47 arrivals," he said.

A ship crowed with migrants flips onto its side Wednesday, May 25, as an Italian navy ship approaches oof the cast of Libya. Passengers had rushed to the port side, as shift in weight that proved too much. Five people died and more than 500 were rescued

Libya is a popular jumping-off point for migrants seeking to reach Europe from North Africa. Smuggling networks are well established there, and the lack of an effective central government makes the job of traffickers easier.
But the crossing can be treacherous, with too many migrants -- some fleeing war or persecution, others seeking a better life -- crammed into what are often barely seaworthy boats.

The Turkish coast guard helps refugees near Aydin, Turkey, after their boat topped en route to Greece on Friday January 22

The UN refugee agency considers the route "extremely dangerous due to the open sea, strong currents and grim weather," UN Radio said.
This year, about half those attempting the journey have taken the Central Mediterranean route, Spindler said.
He also attributed the higher death toll to people smugglers "using lower-quality vessels -- flimsy inflatable rafts that often do not last the journey."
Bad weather during the crossings may also have played a role, and he said smugglers have changed tactics so "there have been mass embarkations of thousands of people at a time," making rescuers' work more difficult.
An agreement in March between the European Union and Turkey resulted in a big reduction in the numbers setting off from Turkey for Greece, a much shorter and less treacherous route, Spindler told UN Radio.

While
human emissions of CO2 remained fairly static between 2014 and 2015,
the onset of a strong El Niño weather phenomenon caused a spike in levels of the gas in the atmosphere.
That's
because the drought conditions in tropical regions produced by El Niño
meant that vegetation was less able to absorb CO2. There were also extra
emissions from fires, sparked by the drier conditions.
In its
annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, the World Meteorological Organisation
says the conditions helped push the growth in the levels of CO2 in the
atmosphere above the average for the last ten years.

Greenhouse gases are vital to life on Earth, but the growing
concentration of certain gases, such as carbon dioxide, is throwing the
planet's delicate balance out of whack.

NASA is on the case, studying
carbon dioxide on a global scale and its effects on our weather and
climate.

At the
atmospheric monitoring station in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, levels of CO2 broke
through 400 parts per million (ppm), meaning 400 molecules of CO2 for
every one million molecules in the atmosphere.
The last time CO2 was regularly above 400ppm was three to five million years ago, say experts.
Prior
to 1800 atmospheric levels were around 280ppm, according to the US
National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).
The WMO
says that the rise through the 400ppm barrier has persisted and it's
likely that 2016 will be the first full year when the measurements show
CO2 above that benchmark, and "hence for many generations".
While the El Niño factor has now disappeared, the human impact on climate change has not, the WMO argues.
"The
year 2015 ushered in a new era of optimism and climate action with the
Paris climate change agreement," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri
Taalas.

The air sampling station at Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii which recorded CO2 levels going through 400ppm

"But it will also make history as marking a new era of climate change reality with record high greenhouse gas concentrations."
The report also details the growth in other greenhouse gases, including methane and nitrous oxide.
In
2015, levels of methane were 2.5 times greater than in the
pre-industrial era, while nitrous oxide was 1.2 times above the historic
measure.
The study also points to the impact of these increased concentrations of warming gases on the world's climate.

From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant
greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of
atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the
journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.

The greening represents an
increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times
the continental United States.

Between
1990 and 2015 there was a 37% increase in radiative forcing or warming
effect, caused by a build up of these substances, from industrial,
agricultural and domestic activities.

While welcoming new
initiatives like the global agreement to phase out HFC gases agreed
recently in Rwanda, the WMO argues that nations must retain their focus
on cutting CO2.

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

From Gizmodo by Maddie Stone
In October 2012, just a few days before Hurricane Sandy slammed into
New Jersey, it was churning north past the narrow strip of white sand
beach separating NASA’s most celebrated spaceport from the sea.
For several days and nights, heavy storm surge pounded the shoreline,
flattening dunes and blowing sand right up to the launchpads.
A stone’s
throw away from the spot where a Saturn V rocket sent the first humans
to the Moon, the ocean took a 100-foot bite out of the beach.
“I
think the telling story is that the storm was almost 230 miles offshore,
and it still had an impact,” Don Dankert, an environmental scientist at
NASA, tells me as we stand with ecologist Carlton Hall atop a rickety
metal security tower overlooking Space Coast.
It is a hot, breathless
day, and the surf laps gently at the deserted shore.
“It makes you wonder what would happen if a storm like that came in much closer, or collided with the coast,” Dankert adds.

That’s a troubling question for NASA, an agency whose most valuablepiece
of real estate—the $10.9 billion sandbar called Kennedy Space Center—is
also its most threatened.
The beating heart of American spaceflight
since the Apollo program, Kennedy was, and still is, the only place on
US soil where humans can launch into orbit.
Today, the center is
enjoying a revival, following a few dark years after the space shuttle
program was mothballed and crewed launches were outsourced to Russia.
The shuttle’s former digs, Launch Pad 39A, is being renovated by
commercial spaceflight company SpaceX for the Falcon Heavy, a beast of a
rocket designed to ferry astronauts into orbit and beyond.
A
few miles up the road, Launch Pad 39B is being modified for the SLS
rocket, which NASA hopes will send the first humans to Mars.
But a glorious future ofbigger
and badder rockets is by no means assured. In fact, that future is
gravely threatened, not by the budget cuts that NASA speaks speaks oftenand candidly
about, but by climate change.
If humans keep putting carbon in the
atmosphere, eventually, Kennedy won’t be sending anybody into space.
It’ll be underwater.

Aerial view of Kennedy Space Center’s two Launch Pads, 39A and 39B,
along with the Launch Control Center, which includes the Vehicle
Assembly Building. Launch Pad 41b is located at Cape Canaveral Air Force
Station.

Image: Josh Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory/USGS

“We are acutely aware that, in the long-term sense, the viability of
our presence at Space Coast is in question,” says Kim Toufectis, a
facilities planner in NASA’s Office of Strategic Infrastructure.
There’s a very good reason NASA built Kennedy Space Center, along
with four other launch and research facilities, on the edge of the sea.
If rockets are going to explode (and in 2016, they still do),
we’d rather them explode over water than over people. “To launch to
space safely, you have to be at the coast,” says Caroline Massey,
assistant director for management operations at Wallops Flight Facility
in Virginia.
Kennedy’s location, at the southern end of the
Merritt Island wildlife refuge and just northwest of Cape Canaveral Air
Force Station, has a few other perks.
Launch pads and other resources
are shared with the Air Force, and weather conditions are good
year-round.
Being close to the equator allows rockets to snag a bigger
velocity boost from the rotation of the Earth.
And yet, even as architects were drawing up plans for Kennedy in the
early 1960s, NASA knew the spaceport’s exposure—to rising sea levels,
hurricanes, and the general wear and tear of the ocean—might one day
cause catastrophic damage.
“They were absolutely concerned about it,”
saysRoger Launius, associate director at the
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and former chief historian for
NASA.
“But they wanted to launch over water. You don’t want to drop
first stages over cities.”

Aerial view of Kennedy Space Center’s shoreline before any launchpads
were installed, left (1943) and in modern history (2007).

Photos
Courtesy John Jaeger.

Now, that water is rising.
Globally, sea levels have gone up about
eight inches since the early 1900s.
For the past two decades, the pace
of rise has been quickening, in step with accelerated melting on the Greenland ice sheet.
At Kennedy, conservative climate models project 5 to 8 inches of sea
level rise by mid-century, and up to 15 inches by the 2080s.
Models that
take changing ice sheet dynamics into account predict as much as fifty
inches (4.2 feet) of rise by the 2080s.
In an even more dire scenario,
Space Coast sees over six feet of rise by the end of the
century, causing many of the roads and launchpads, not to mention sewers
and buried electrical infrastructure, to become swamped.
“I hope we
don’t go there,” Hall said.
On top of rising seas, Kennedy
faces a stormier future—more extreme hurricanes in the summer and
nor’easters in the winter.
“We started to notice a real issue with
coastal erosion following the 2004 hurricanes,” says John Jaeger, a
coastal geologist at the University of Florida.
Jaeger is part of a team of scientists who’ve been studying long-term
shoreline recession at Space Coast, which can be traced back to the
1940s through aerial photographs.
But while natural erosion has been
reshaping Kennedy’s sandy fringes for decades, a recent uptick in
powerful storms has Jaeger worried for the future.
“As geologists, we
know it’s these big events that do all the work,” he says.

NASA’s Climate Adaptation Sciences Investigators Workgroup (CASI) shares this concern.
In a recent review
of the space agency’s climate vulnerability, this team of in-house
Earth scientists and facilities managers cited extreme weather and
flooding as major hazards to future operations at Kennedy.
Even under
modest sea level rise scenarios, ten-year flood events are expected to
occur two to three times as often by mid-century.
And the more the ocean
rises, the easier it’ll be for storms to cause flooding.
“I use the metaphor that a small change in the average can lead to a
big change in extremes,” says Ben Strauss, vice president for sea level
rise and climate impacts at Climate Central.
“In basketball, it’s pretty hard to get a slam dunk, but if you raised the floor a foot, they would happen all the time.”
In other words, thecoastal damage caused by Sandy may be a small taste of what Kennedy Space Center is in for.
After soaking in the view for a few moments, Dankert, Hall and I
climb down from the watchtower and drive south to Kennedy’s dune
restoration site, which was completed in 2014
with federal Hurricane Sandy relief funds.
Stretching a little over a
mile between Launch Complexes 39A and 39B, the dune’s grassy slopes rise
like lightly yeasted bread over the sprawling beach.
If you didn’t know
better, you might think the shoreline had looked this way for
centuries.

View along the beach of Kennedy Space Center’s dune restoration site in 2014.

Photo Courtesy Dan Casper/NASA.

“We’re drawing a line in the sand,” Dankert says.
“The dune not only
prevents storm surge from plowing inland, it’s a sand source that
replenishes the beach.”
It’s an astonishingly low-tech barrier when you consider the artificial pumping systems installed at Miami Beach to keep the ocean at bay, or the enormous seawalls some experts think we’ll need to save Manhattan.
But in protecting its shoreline, NASA is trying to be considerate of all
of its residents.
In addition to rockets, Kennedy is home to a stunning
array of wildlife, from bobcats and coyotes to southeastern beach mice,
scrub jays, and gopher tortoises.
It’s a major nesting site for
protected leatherback, green, and loggerhead sea turtles, with thousands
of baby turtles born on this small stretch of beach each year.
“We are a wildlife refuge—that is a huge part of our program,”
Dankert says, adding that in addition to maintaining the shoreline,
Kennedy’s newly-restored dune blocks artificial light from the launch
pads, which can disorient female sea turtles as they’re coming ashore to
nest.
For the past few years, the dune has held strong,
preventing the ocean from spilling over onto the historic shuttle
railroad that traces along the coast.
Eventually, NASA would like to put
in another two miles of dune, fortifying the entire shoreline between
Launch Complexes 39A and 39B.
As with all government projects, the hang-up is funding.
The
post-Sandy dune reconstruction was completed for a cool $3 million,
using beach-quality sand trucked up from Cape Canaveral.
“We got really
lucky—that sand was a big cost-saver,” Hall says, noting that the bill
might have run in the tens of millions had NASA been forced to dredge
sand from offshore.

Still, ten, twenty, or even fifty million dollars pales in comparison
to the value of the launchpads that sit just a quarter mile inland.
“To
rebuild a pad is a few billion dollars,” Hall says.
“To spend a few
million every few years instead is a pretty good investment.”
Although Kennedy is NASA’s most threatened asset, all of the space agency’s properties—some $32 billion worth of infrastructureused
for scientific research, aeronautics testing, astronaut training, deep
space missions, and vehicle assembly—face challenges in a changing
climate.
Sea levels at the Johnson Research Center in Texas are rising
at a whopping 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) per decade, faster than any
other coastal center by a factor of two or three.
The Michoud Assembly
Facility in New Orleans sits below sea level, surrounded by 19 foot-high
levees, on rapidly-sinking ground. Inland facilities are bracing for
more excessively hot days, and the Ames Research Center in Silicon
Valley is preparing for a future of drought.
“This is a very
large concern for our agency as a whole,” Toufectis says.
And given our
growing need to go into space, not just for scientific research, but to harness new resources, colonize other worlds, and monitor and study the one overburdened biosphere we’ve got, anything that threatens future operations and NASA threatens the entire nation.
At
Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s eastern shore, climate change
isn’t some existential problem for the future—it’s reality.
The center’s
sounding rocket launch pads, which have sent countless aircraft models
and science experiments into suborbital space, sit on a six square-mile
barrier island just a few hundred feet from the ocean, alongside two
Virginia-owned pads used for satellite launches and ISS resupply runs.
Sea levels are rising, storms are getting fiercer, and protective
beaches are eroding rapidly.
“We live with climate change every day,”
Massey says.

Areas around five coastal NASA centers that would be inundated by 12
inches (30 cm) of sea level rise (red).

Image: Josh Stevens/NASA Earth
Observatory

Wallops Island started hardening its defenses in earnest in the ‘90s,
when NASA erected a 3.5 mile stone seawall in front of the launch pads.
But while the wall initially helped to reduce storm damage, the beach
beyond it was soon worn to shreds.
By the mid 2000s, storm waves were
breaking directly against the wall, causing sections to crumble into the
sea.
And so, in the spring of 2012 and the summer of 2014, with a $54
million investment from Congress, NASA and the US Army Corps of
Engineers dredged almost 4 million cubic yards of sand from offshore,
and a new beach was built beyond the wall.
The impact was sudden and
dramatic.
“When Hurricane Irene hit in 2011, Wallops [Island] was
flooded, we had $3.8 million in storm damage, and we couldn’t work there
for a few weeks,” Massey says.
But when Sandy, virtually the same
strength as Irene, blew past Virginia’s coastline a year later?
“There
was no island flooding to speak of, and we could have kept the power on
the entire time,” Massey says.
“The only difference was our shoreline
protection program.”

At Wallops as at Kennedy, shoring up the shoreline every few years is
considered an economical way to manage the risk right now.
But looking
out toward the late 21st century and beyond, NASA may be forced to leave
some of these launchpads behind.
“In the long-term, I would be shocked
if we don’t see more than six feet of sea level rise,” Strauss says.
“That amount may simply be incompatible with a lot of NASA’s coastal
infrastructure.”
Picking up and moving inland, or “managed retreat” in the urban
planning parlance, is the last thing the space agency wants to do.
Ironically, it probably won’t be a major storm or flood that forces
NASA’s hand.
It’ll be its employees.
You can’t have rocket launches on
Space Coast if you can’t find engineers, mission directors and launch
personnel willing to run them—which is to say, people willing to live
and work in an increasingly hostile environment.
“The point at which we get serious about moving is the point at which the community is no longer viable,” Toufectis said.

Full-scale withdrawal at any of NASA’s centers is probably decades
away.
But at Wallops, the seeds of a managed retreat mentality are
already starting to sink in.
There’s now an intensive screening process
for what can be built on the island: “It has to be something we can only
do safely over water,” says Josh Bundick, program manager for
management operations at Wallops.

Newer buildings are placed on elevated pilings or raised floors, with
all critical electrical infrastructure installed above the flood line.
Island operations are run by a skeleton crew, while the vast majority of
Wallops employees work at the facility’s main base a few miles inland.
NASA hasn’t broken off its relationship with Wallops Island, but it is
creating distance.

As I head back to Kennedy’s visitor center, ogling the tremendous
Vehicle Assembly Building where the Saturn V rocket was put together, I
can’t help but feel a strange sense of cognitive dissonance.
Here I am,
at a place that radiates optimism, that flaunts the raw power of human
technology that was built to explore the infinite, only to learn of
man’s essential helplessness in the face of nature.
The sense of two
parallel realities grows stronger as I return to my hotel in Titusville,
where gaggles of tourists take selfies with replica astronaut suits and
locals share beers over the latest SpaceX gossip.
This isn’t a
community with any intention of going anywhere.
But no matter
what the future holds for Space Coast, one thing is clear: defending
this shoreline now isn’t a waste.
Places on the front lines of climate
change have lessons to teach us about standing one’s ground, and
deciding when the ground can no longer stand.
And those lessons may wind
up being more valuable than a hundred launchpads.

“Look, human beings are all mortals,” Strauss says.
“But that doesn’t
stop us from leading meaningful lives. I could tell you that the
barrier islands on the Atlantic coast may not survive this century and
almost certainly won’t survive the next, but that doesn’t mean we can’t
make good use of them now. We just have to keep our eyes open.”

One of life’s great mysteries, the Bermuda Triangle might have
finally found an explanation.
This strange region, that lies in the
North Atlantic Ocean between Bermuda, Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico,
has been the presumed cause of dozens and dozens of mind-boggling
disappearances of ships and planes.

The Bermuda Triangle lore includes such stories as that of Flight 19,
a group of 5 U.S. torpedo bombers that vanished in the Triangle in
1945.
A rescue plane sent to look for them also disappeared. Other
stories include the mystery of USS Cyclops, resulting
in the largest non-combat loss of life in U.S. Navy’s history.
The ship
with a crew of 309 went missing in 1918.
Even as recently as 2015, El Faro, a cargo ship with 33 on board vanished in the area.

Altogether, as far as we know, 75 planes and
hundreds of ships met their demise in the Bermuda Triangle.
Possible
causes for the catastrophes have been proposed over time, ranging from
the paranormal, electromagnetic interference that causes compass
problems, bad weather, the gulf stream, and large undersea fields of
methane.
Now, a new theory has been proposed by meteorologists that claims
that the reason for the mysteries pervading the Bermuda Triangle area
are unusual hexagonal clouds creating 170 mph air bombs full of wind.
These air pockets cause all the mischief, sinking ships and downing planes.

courtesy of Science Channel

By studying imagery from a NASA satellite, the scientists concluded that some of these clouds reach 20 to 55 miles across.
Waves inside these wind monsters can reach as high as 45 feet.
What’s more - the clouds have straight edges.

As told by Colorado State University’s satellite meteorologist Dr. Steve Miller to Science Channel’s “What on Earth”: “You don’t typically see straight edges with clouds. Most of the time, clouds are random in their distribution."

What’s special about that?

Meteorologist Randy Cerveny added: “The satellite imagery is really bizarre… These
types of hexagonal shapes over the ocean are in essence air bombs. They
are formed by what are called microbursts and they’re blasts of air
that come down out of the bottom of a cloud and then hit the ocean and
then create waves that can sometimes be massive in size as they start to
interact with each other.”

Anything caught inside one of these air bombs could be very well
knocked out of the air, flipped over, sunk.
More observation is needed
to confirm this theory that could finally explain many of the infamous
Bermuda Triangle events.
Scientists are pouring over satellite imagery
to confirm.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

secretocean-thefilm.comNarrated by renowned oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle, “Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Secret Ocean 3D” offers a breakthrough look at a secret world within the ocean that is perhaps the biggest story of all—that the smallest life in the sea is the mightiest force on which we all depend.

Alongside marine biologist Holly Lohuis, Jean-Michel Cousteau invites audiences to dive into this whole new world that will leave them in awe of the beauty and diversity of the oceans – the source of all life on our planet – and inspire an even stronger desire to protect what they have either seen for the first time or perhaps re-discovered along the journey.

Filmed over 3 years in vibrant marine environments from the Bahamas to Fiji, the first giant screen film directed by Jean-Michel Cousteau provides a compelling, breakthrough look at a secret world within the ocean that is perhaps the biggest story of all—that the smallest life in the sea is the mightiest force on which we all depend.

"Secret Ocean 3D" engages audiences of all ages to experience the ocean as never before.

With breathtaking underwater sequences, viewers are introduced to over 30 species — some no bigger than one inch — and will discover behaviors captured for the very first time thanks to the development of new filming technologies in ultra-HD 5K, slow motion, macro, and with motion control.

"Since the 1940s, the Cousteau family has been deeply connected to the water. Millions of people have grown up with our Calypso adventures, which revealed to the public what was a totally unknown world at that time," said Jean-Michel Cousteau.

"Thanks to the new technology developed specifically for us, I immediately understood that this was a revolution in underwater filming that would allow us to capture a whole new range of behaviors I had never before witnessed in my 71 years of diving. 'Secret Ocean 3D' takes us one step further in the discovery of the ocean in a way my father, Jacques Cousteau, could have only imagined."

"From the time of my very first dive, I've had the frustration of knowing that there was always more beyond what I could see, but technology is key to being able to see the ocean with new eyes," said narrator Dr. Sylvia Earle.

"Thanks to the stunning giant screen format, 'Secret Ocean' allows us a deeper understanding of all life in the sea, the heart of our planet, and encourages us to take care of not only the large creatures, such as whales and dolphins, but also the tiny creatures that make the rest of life possible. With knowing comes caring, but first we need to know."

Alongside marine biologist Holly Lohuis, Jean-Michel Cousteau provides a brand new view of the underwater world that will leave audiences in awe of the beauty and diversity of the oceans – the source of all life on our planet – and inspire an even stronger desire to protect what they have seen for the first time, or re-discovered along the journey.